I am a long time follower of Core77 and the forum, but this is my first post. I am hoping to get more involved in the future. I am a student currently finishing up my 3rd year in the Industrial Design program at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. I am hoping to find an internship for the upcoming summer, so I have been putting together my first portfolio. I am hoping that the community here can give me some feedback and help me improve my portfolio towards an internship. Let me know whats good, bad, and downright awful. Follow the link below to view my portfolio on Coroflot:

For the first project, I think I would title it Portable energy generator, because I have no idea what a wave energy converter is. For the research outcomes in the gray box, see if you can get them to a short, quick easily readable bullet point so someone who is looking at this project in 30 seconds can grasp the outcomes.

The Ideation sketches look good for the rough stage, do you have any more tight sketches that communicate your final design? They'd be great to see and to show off you have the skills, because right now they would only be presentable at an internal type meeting, not to a client.

Really nice prototyping and final model, you got skills!

General tip: watch the hyphenated words, on "the Problem" page in the water bottle it goes at-tached, I've noticed a few of them and they're distracting.

Water Bottle Project: For the research, maybe tell the outcomes, rather than just show pictures, it'll help tell the story of your project more.

Looks pretty good. I think I would get rid of the "page of renderings" These don't really show any skills that you haven't shown in the rest of your projects and they are distracting and irrelevant. I like your thought process and final form refinement much more on the water bottle than the energy generator. I think I might put the water bottle first as your attention getter. On all of your sketch pages try to vary sketch sizes and give the page some more interest.

Thanks to skoshbox and cwitham for your feedback! I have made a few small changes based on your comments, and I am continuing to work on my sketching, and doing some back sketching to improve my projects. I'm always interested in more feedback, so if anyone else has time to take a look it would be much appreciated!

I think your wave converter could be a much stronger project if you included an exploded view. At the moment I understand what the product would do but I don't really get how it does it. You have an explanation page but you only go into the basic decisions of the form. An exploded view would make the concept much more understandable and "graspable" if that is the right word.

I also agree with the comments above that you should really get rid of the rendering page and continue to vary up the size on your sketch pages. On one page you have a blue line to show the directions the viewer should look, but this is possible to achieve just with composition and size variety.

Finally looking at your cover page I thought that your portfolio would have a very strong underlying grid, which would be the theme to tie the projects together. In the portfolio it doesn't come across this way (sometimes you center things, sometimes you don't) and it doesn't look the colors have any real basis either. This probably wasn't the goal of the cover, so I am just letting you know my initial impressions.

Okay, these are all mostly little things but I hope they were helpful. Good luck on portfolio work!

Thanks Holixx! I've struggled a bit with how best to explain the energy generator project, and I think your idea is exactly what was missing. I have added an exploded view, so hopefully that helps to communicate the project a bit better. As for the cover/grid, I used a 6x6 grid (same as the cover) throughout my portfolio, but looking through I can see I may not have used it very effectively. I went back and rearranged some of the pages, and added elements of the teal and purple throughout, to try to tie everything together a little better.

The updated version is available through the original link in the first post. Again, I'm always ready for more help, so if there are any other takers, let me know what you think!